If it is going to win the struggle for the future, spirituality must first overcome a major disadvantage. In the popular imagination science long ago discredited religion. Facts replaced faith. Superstition was vanquished. That’s why Darwin’s explanation of man’s descent from lower primates prevails over Genesis, and why we look to the Big Bang as the source of the cosmos, rather than a creation myth populated by one or more gods.
So it’s important to begin by saying that religion isn’t the whole of spirituality—far from it. Even God isn’t the whole of spirituality. Organized religion may have discredited itself, but spirituality has suffered no such defeat. Thousands of years ago, in cultures across the globe, inspired spiritual teachers such as Buddha, Jesus, and Lao-Tzu, proposed profound views of life. They taught that a transcendent domain resides beyond the everyday world of pain and struggle. Although the eye beholds rocks, mountains, trees, and sky, this is only a veil drawn over a vast, mysterious, unseen reality. Beyond the reach of the five senses lies an invisible realm of infinite possibility, and the key to unfolding its potential is consciousness. Go within, the sages and seers declared, and there you will find the true source of everything: your own awareness.
